


Stephanos

by Violsva



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Depression, Drinking to Cope, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Yuletide, apotheosis, obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 18:30:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13036956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violsva/pseuds/Violsva
Summary: They found her weeping on the rocky coast.





	Stephanos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lightningwaltz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/gifts).



They found her weeping on the rocky coast. They picked her up, and dragged her away from shore, and took her home to the city. One woman, Arete, made up a bed on her floor, made her a bowl of gruel, gave her watered wine. She drank the wine; any food given her she left untouched.

Arete’s husband said nothing; they could afford to feed her, and he expected she would take up work, spin thread, become, perhaps, a servant, or perhaps marry out of the house in due time. She did not work; she drank, and cried. But she saved her loudest cries of sorrow for the daytime, when he was away fishing; so he did not mind.

Her hostess minded. Arete argued, fought, pleaded—dragged the girl to her feet and shoved a spindle into her hands. She took her out into the courtyard, under the sun, and the girl flinched away into the shadows. She gave her only water with her gruel, and when she still would not eat she took the water away entirely.

At last she ate, boiled barley gone cold long since. She ate, and Arete brought her water, and she drank a little of it and asked for wine.

“Drink the water first.”

She did.

Arete complained to the other women about her guest, but she never suggested that any of them should take her in instead. And slowly, after that first request for wine, she got the girl to talk to her. To tell her her name, which they still hadn’t known.

“Ariadne.”

They had heard the news from Knossos by then, but Arete didn’t mention it.

Ariadne still would not spin or weave, but sometimes she swept the courtyard and cleaned the house, staggering a little, because she was still always drunk. She cooked a little, she did some work, but her hands were still as smooth and soft as a princess’s by the time of the festival of Dionysus.

“Of course you will come,” said Arete, a little cattily. But she did.

The women ran into the hills every year on the appointed day, casting aside their responsibilities with their veils, and fashioning staffs for themselves adorned with vines and pinecones. Some of the men came as well, often dressed in women’s gowns, and some stayed by the shores to dance on the ripe grapes and welcome the god as he crossed the sea from Asia.

Ariadne came with them up the mountain, and did not come down again.

***

Theseus had landed them on the far side of the island, away from the city, and Ariadne had not known why. When she had asked he had laughed, and said he wanted some time with her, and with his thoughts, before he was surrounded again with people, and had to explain what had happened in Knossos.

And when she woke in the morning he had not been there, and his ship was out of sight. She had not understood it at first, and then she had wept, and then she had raged at the sea, shouted “Why?” and received no answer. And at last she had fallen weeping to the rocks until the women of Naxos had found her.

That was what she told the god, who perhaps already knew. Perhaps he knew as well what she did not tell him.

She had thought she was so clever, at home in Crete, helping him. They had called Theseus clever, the other Athenians, and courageous and strong. He didn’t look strong, but that, he told her, was why he needed to be clever.

And she had thought then that women, having no strength, needed to be more clever, and that he might understand her. That he _did_ understand her, and that she knew all about him.

She had wanted to die, on Naxos, and then she had wanted to dream of Theseus, and the wine had given her that at first, though never happily. But then she had stopped dreaming of Theseus, and dreamt instead of the god.

She always knew it was him, though she had had little to do with his worship at home, though he came to her in many forms, as a boy, as a bearded man, as a strange youth wearing ordinary women's robes or the elaborate dresses of a Cretan priestess. His eyes never changed, and neither did his wild self. So she had recognized him when he came to her on the mountain.

All he had asked her then was “Come away with me,” and that she had agreed to at once. She could not think of anything she wanted more than to be _away_ , and she was too caught up in her desires and her drunkenness to realize that what she wanted to be away from was herself.

***

For a while, with the god, all was much like the festival she had left. She was drunk, she was continually drunk, on wine and music and sex, for sex seemed a light thing to her then, when she had been raised to see it as properly based only on love or worship. Perhaps it was the influence of the god, but perhaps it was Theseus. Having lost her virginity to him on Crete, and lost him on Naxos, there seemed no reason why she should not lie with Dionysus, with maenads, with satyrs, with nymphs whose bodies were always on the edge of becoming water, or tree bark.

The landscape was familiar, but never quite recognizable; and it responded to her hand as it did to the god’s. Did she want a drink of wine, or milk, she thrust her staff into the earth and a fountain sprang from it. Did she want food, trees bent down to give her fruit, and animals leapt into her hands.

But she still tired, she still ached if she climbed or ran too far, her head throbbed when she woke after drinking and she bled when she cut herself on thorns or scraped her skin on rocks. She was still human, but her cares had gone.

The god sought out her company, and she rejoiced in his. And though it did not stop being a festival, she began to notice more outside it. The god left, sometimes, and returned tired, or ecstatic, and sometimes he spoke of what he had done, and she realized that he had been to Greece. Which meant, surely, that this was not quite Greece.

She listened with the satyrs and maenads to his adventures, and soon she started seeking him out to ask for more, and then just to talk, and he sought her out as well, and she did not let herself remember another seeking out, a bull jumper and a princess.

“Is it always summer here?” she asked Dionysus once. It was late summer, of course—the grapes were ripe—but she never needed a cloak. She didn’t know how long it had been. She had never counted the days, not after Theseus left her and not after the god found her.

“Are you tired of the food?” he asked, laughing. “You could have ambrosia instead.” She blinked at him, stunned by the casualness of the offer. “It is permitted.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said, blunt in her surprise, and he laughed again.

“It is permitted to you.” He raised a hand, and a dove flew to it, bearing a flower in its claws. The blossom was brimful of golden liquid. He offered it to her.

She looked at him, and thought of Crete, and Naxos, and Theseus, and Arete, and Dionysus. She thought, most of all, of the promise implied in immortality.

She took the flower.

Once she asked the god why, why he loved her and why Theseus had not, and he looked directly into her eyes, his own dark and serious if not sober, and said, “I do not know.”

***

They hold the festival for Dionysus every year, and the women run up into the hills, shouting and laughing. And with the sacrifices to the god are other sacrifices, for the year after Ariadne landed there they saw her again at the festival.

They had searched for her the day after last year’s festival, when they realized she had not returned, and found nothing—not her body nor even her clothes. Some of them remembered seeing her on the mountain, but all of them had been drunk and uncertain of their memories. But the next year, they all agreed. She had been many different places, but she had been seen by everyone, wearing a leopard skin and with vines tangled in her hair, her eyes shining.

And so they built her a shrine, next to the god’s, and Arete placed a bowl of wine before it, silent with awe at whom she had hosted.


End file.
